Sterling Software
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Software company founded by Sterling Williams. Subsequently chaired by Sam Wyly, who was a major shareholder.
History of acquiring other software companies. An incomplete list follows. It started in 1980 and the major step was the, still unique in software history, hostile take-over of Informatics General Inc, in 1985. Informatics was certainly one of the first established software and services company. It built MARK IV (1970s), a major 4GL and the first software totaling $1M revenue, after IBM (1969) was condemned to unbundle software with hardware.
Helped by wise financing and conseled by Werner Frank, one of Informatics co-founder, who had left this company a year before, Sterling Software started the hostile take over by offering to shareholders an interesting price per share and increasing it slowly until Informatics board was no more able to reject it. Overnight, Sterling Software became a $200M revenue company up from $20M. After only 2 years, they started again acquiring new companies. The list could be too long to be interesting. More details are available here some history
Acquired Informatics in 1985.
Acquired KnowledgeWare in 1994.
Acquired the Software Division from Texas Instruments in 1997, including the rights to IEF.
Acquired Cayenne Software in 1998.
Was then acquired by Computer Associates (CA) in 2000. Sam Wyly subsequently launched an unsuccessful bid to replace the CA board.
[edit] External links
- Going in for the CA kill - interview with Sam Wyly.
